THE LOST CAUSE COLLECTIVE...... First Draft Excerpt

ONE - (Sort of…)You’re saddled with a condition. There’s no getting better. The observations are all conclusive. The numbers add up to your number being up. The sky is falling in and there’s bollocks all on the box.On the other hand; your flatmate beat you to it. His termination confirmation was rubber stamped first. His conclusion is up in the air and now there’s a foot race to the sod for the pair of you to ponder.You are both forty something, three ex-wives between you. There have been no children, through choice and through something less empowering yet more arbitrary and isn’t that a grand fucking metaphorical fish slap to the face?You have your flat; serviceable, untidy, damp, mouldy but cheap. When summer hangs high and the days are long, great splashes of light litter the crumb encrusted carpet and point out the most direct route to the bathroom. Don’t mind the real ale bottles, voided of content; they lay in state across the available surfaces. Recycling is one long repetitive waste of labour.In the waste and death of winter, your breath hangs around your shoulders and the flat’s pipes sound like a hammer to the head as they attempt to encourage circulation through the clogged up arteries of your dual failures.Still; no point wallowing amidst unpaid bills or unmade wills.Roll your fucking sleeves up son, you’ve always been industrious, even when it involved leaving your labour sweating and sticking to the dead skin boat of your fantasy-stained mattress.And here comes the pull; the push, the catch-line, punch-line, tag-line and Hollywood fucking hook line and sink your teeth into this fleshy, juicy capillary of a story…You just decided to rob some banks. Just like that. Nothing fucking to it, son. We’re all adults here and all of that bollocks. Between the pair of you and the ruined hearts of a small but significant number of British females, it all amounted to no mention in the obits, no column inches, no solemn asides; just a few shaken heads, photos of newly-weds and the odd uttered “There you bloody go,” or “You never fucking know,” and we’re all sat back around the camp fire talking about the arbitrary nature of the Cosmos again.Bollocks to that too.If you’re going to check out, drop the cerebral key onto the celestial reception desk and promise an eternal departure on a never-to-return-no-reunion-tour basis, then you had better be sure of your exit strategy.Robbing banks, at its absolute News at Ten, shit the bed best, would guarantee some measure of comfort against the waning of the light. Would you rather die in a shithole in Putney or on a luxury yacht, afloat a bright blue moat, somewhere in the sun bleached bananas?So you don’t live in Putney. And that loosely is where our motivation reared its greedy head.Now so far, it’s all been bravado, no sign of what you know, just ‘hey, if I’ve got to die then I’ve got to try to improve my Salem’s.But I’ve never robbed a bank before and behind the shades, there’s a certain liquid apprehension at work. We’re not young men to be going at life within the confines of a suit jacket from the charity shop and our best jeans. But we’re old enough to have given up smoking and landed the Big C just for a joke/laugh/bitter summation in a paragraph.I need to tell you about this plan and the routes to and from it. Someone once told me that he who shouts the loudest has the least to say.It’s probably right. My GP practically fucking whispered when he pulled my plug out.So, robbing banks and the whole ethical dilemma that ensues…

1 (in the traditional sense)Alcohol can work wonders on an otherwise uninspired and routine discourse. It can certainly fan the pompous flame of entitlement to a left behind legacy or a desire to be remembered for something other than paying your bills and then vacating the premises.I had been skirting around the edges of a shitty mood for a number of days. The X had been ranting down the telephone at me regarding my apparent shiftlessness in the face of her odd job list. X and I have misunderstood our roles within our understanding. Although we are no longer together, we still lean from time to time on the comfort of familiarity. We bend each other’s ears for advice or agreement regarding our somewhat unique approaches to the world around us. We don’t understand each other enough to live together but we understand enough to gang up on the rest of the world and declare our neurosis’ viable.For the few days preceding the decision to go out with a bang, X had badgered, cajoled and ultimately threatened me in an attempt to have her plumbing looked at or paid for. I’m no plumber but then again, I’m no cash investor with equity in the types of business that fill the Yellow Pages.Avoiding X was all part of the natural cycle; my way of doing things. I would eventually turn up with a tool bag and a wallet and attempt to put out her little stress fires as best I could.Since my diagnosis, I had determined to avoid the elbow deep in wires or water afternoons that could spoil my diary. I knew I would have to confess to my illness at some point. The problem being that X might well deduce that I had become ill as a symptom of my selfish bastardness and with my usual lack of appropriate timing.I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the timing myself, so at least in that regard, we would find some common ground.My last message from X went as follows;“Have you left the fucking country? Why aren’t you returning my calls? You know I can’t afford to do all this by myself. Just call me, will you?”I hadn’t at that point acquired the funds to leave the country but it wouldn’t be long before that detail would be dealt with.Dan (never Danny) had taken the initial drunken idea and was now running with it. We had a campaign map cased out with drawing pins, stuck to the kitchen wall. Dan is a copious note taker, list creator and obstacle annihilator when he is up. When he is down, he is just as good at remaining in bed as anyone I know. This idea though, had worked its way into his bones, burrowed into his imagination and was making all sorts of promises that his ego found attractive. It had quickly escalated into our Chief Subject of Conversation.

1 (the meat and potatoes of the idea, such as it is)“So it actually takes care of a number of concerns all at once,” says Dan. “Money in our pockets, a bit of adventure and going out with a bang instead of a fart.”Dan is an actor. He has never been in anything that I can name since I met him, but he is an actor in the same way that he is an inventor. He talks about opportunities and great ideas a lot. The bank suggestion had been one of his great ideas.He does still have a poster for a 1994 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which he says he was brilliant for a couple of weeks in a couple of theatres in Liverpool, Bolton and Newcastle. When I had suggested that three venues hardly constituted a tour he had said ‘how many fucking gigs do Pink Floyd do when they tour, arse head?”Dan can be aggressive when he feels he is not being listened to.Second thoughts and guesses tend to cloud the vision of second chances and I’ve had more than a few final second chances in my time. That’s the ignominy of irony and the great shifting paradigm all in one easy to burst little bubble. Treading water will keep you afloat but it hardly constitutes a lifestyle choice. That said, I’m all about risk this morning. All about the ‘what if?’ and the tits up principle. That Dan and I can conceive a thing, is no guarantee that we can achieve it as discussed. We’ve aborted many a fine idea, including a wine wholesaling business, fancy dress shop and a sitcom about two men in their forties sharing a flat in Walton.Downstairs is the street. Its cracked pavements, disregarded consumer goods packages and grey puddles all point to the less than successful local social economic demography. When people talk on the street, optimism rises in their voices but this year is the same as last and next year has a low expectation pinned to it, long before it comes trumpeting into the present, accompanied by another New Years’ Eve attitude of abandonment, with its New Years’ Day sense of personal destruction and gloom.The low price bakers, barber shops, hairdressers, turf accountants and charity shops seem to peddle their goods with reasonable regularity and the pubs certainly do alright, meet markets for flesh pressers unattached and otherwise.Dan has been trying to escape since he came home in a blaze of bruised bollocks from London four years ago. He hadn’t been able to secure enough paying gigs to swim around the wine bars and network whoever it is you need to network in order to be a working character actor.Since then, he has been a man with a van for a while but stereotypically, his van, loaded with someone else’s furniture and past was robbed when parked up on its way to his client’s future. Dan had stopped off for a lunchtime baguette and to punt a fiver on a nearly dead donkey at Chepstow.I met him at a Job Club, just before X Fung Shui-d me out of her life for a kitchen fitter from Middlesbrough by the name of Justin. Justin made himself at home and then sodded off with her money and one of her mates to the North East. What goes around, it would seem, does indeed sometimes come around but we were both probably better off anyway.What’s in a name?I’ve never met anyone called Justin that I have liked or trusted. Which brings us to…Now, really. Give or take a few insignificant life events and two terminal diagnoses. The plan isn’t much of a plan but in the absence of a genuine creative spark, or finding a bag of money in a shed, will have to diddly-do.What about the shooters?Dan is keen to get started. He has a map and felt tip pens and masks and a rucksack and just about everything else that one might need to rob a post office, bank, betting shop or Greggs Bakers. He wants guns, too. Not that I’m particularly enthused with that idea. It seems an ethical dilemma of no small proportion to be sticking a pistol in someone’s face and threatening their life, even as my own is winding down. Where’s the sense in that?Why the guns, son? Why the extra hassle for the sake of the razmatazzle? It’s chic, it’s cool, its post-modern posters in student land. People have forgotten what guns are all about, the blip, the spit and the exploding pout. We’ve forgotten what the point is. Actors push them into people’s faces and the audience goes ‘oooohhhhh.’ When real guns find themselves in real faces, faces that belong to people called Derek, who just happened to nip into his local Bradford and Bingley for a spot of advice, I’m sure the audience doesn’t go ‘oooohhhhh.’So there’s guns to contend with and here’s another thing…

What if it comes to that?The unspoken message of the gun when you have one sat on the coffee table in front of you; is the logical probable conclusion to carrying the gun. It’s a weights and measures article, a pro or a con. You require maximum result for your efforts; you want all the money they will give you. They will give you more if you wave a gun at them and then you can get out quicker and richer.That’s the pre-agreed script. That’s the way it has worked for many years. We understand this from watching TV. When a gun is introduced to a bank queue, everyone gets on the floor, people hurry to the safes and the alarms aren’t sounded until the bad guys are out of the door. They are the rules and people play by them, by and large.What we don’t know is what happens to all of those people inside the bank once the bad guys have gone. What are they left with in the way of after care? What behavioural changes can they expect to experience?I’m not so excited about leaving a lot of pan-fried stress puppets in our wake. I don’t want to be responsible for hundreds of people going on the sick.Then again, I’d obviously sooner missing man hours in the work place than missing DNA from the gene pool.The trouble with guns is that they kill people. Full stop. I’ve heard and read the arguments from the gun glorification lobbyists; it’s the person not the pistol, blah-blah bollocks, Buddha.If you don’t carry a gun you can’t shoot anyone.Simple. And if you do, to my mind at least, you most probably will and when you do, it could be a traffic warden or a person who interrupts the order of the queuing system in the betting shop.The only certainty with humanity beyond death is that we’re a set of moody bastards. Guns don’t dance well with that moody bastard thing. So I’m a bit apprehensive about the guns. I’m actually a bit apprehensive about the whole thing. Robbing banks is illegal and carries a hefty penal penalty. Waving guns about in the open air is also pretty heavy duty and if one goes off, suddenly our jolly little plan to die rich looks a tad skewed.

All in allI’m not looking forward to getting started. Unfortunately, you can’t finish a thing that you haven’t started and you should never start a thing without the intention of finishing it. Also, to finish before you even get started is just not the thing to do. It’s frowned upon, sort of like breaking the law.

All things start in the pubFour of us convene in the pub because every organisation needs office staff and someone to organise all of the minutiae, like buying the paperclips. Dan’s mate Lucy is here and so is Eye Contact. We won’t make any real inroads into discussions until Eye Contact has spotted someone else to latch onto and fucked off. He’s not a mate; he’s just one of the incidental members of the cast. Imagine your local pub. It’s the one that you go and have a pint in when you have a couple of hours to kill and the other half is out doing something that your presence would ruin for her. It’s the pub that you might watch the football or rugby in, maybe even cricket if you have the odd spare week.Populating this pub is a number of faces that you recognise, some of whom you know to talk to and some of whom have names that you can remember.Somewhere in this pub, your local, is Eye Contact. He stands in the corner or by a fruit machine, he lingers like a singer looking for applause and his energy is fed by eye contact. The moment he has it, he’s locked on and you’re stuck with him and his theories and his banal stories. If you leave, he goes with you.Lucy is a friend of Dan’s. They met on one of those casual shag websites that people who are bored with their formal shags use. Lucy is a bit younger than Dan to the tune of ten or so years but what’s a decade when you’re filling a poo pipe, right? Dan says plastic in the bum isn’t as traumatic as one might suppose. It’s not on my bucket list.Which brings us to……The idea of the bucket list. The items to try before you die. Lucy is quite impressed with our bank job idea and not merely because we have promised her a wedge should she decide to co-ordinate our land movement. When Eye Contact spots a collection of ‘milf’s’ in fancy dress and with due diligence to his neglected member, smartly fucks off, we are free to resume.Lucy knew a bloke, who robbed a launderette two streets from his bedsit. His plan was to fund a holiday to Tenerife but he had to settle for a ferry to New Brighton. Evidently somewhat dispirited by the results, he immediately retired from the stand and deliver caper and got a job servicing bumper cars for the fairground.Dan wants to know if Lucy had ‘shagged’ the ‘bloke’ and looks a little disappointed when she replies in the negative. Dan’s a bit odd like that.“I’d known him for years. He was a mate of me brother’s.”“Mmmm,” says, Dan, all things presumably explained to his satisfaction.“Do we know anyone else between us who’s done anything like this?” I say. None of us bite. Dan has a cousin who once mugged a guy in the park but didn’t like it.“He said he gave the fella his money back and apologised.”I’m taking this badly. I have a social conscience, most of the time and I haven’t managed to seriously injure anyone in any way that I am aware of. The experiences of these would-be criminals and the dissatisfaction they experienced in the aftermath of their exploits, bodes a shade on the shit side, as it pertains to our little venture.learning from the expertsI have long believed that if I need to know how to fix an engine, I talk to someone who can fix an engine. It isn’t always possible to discuss the finer points of life with leaders in the relevant fields and so we generally fall back on talking to blokes in the pub.There are reasons why this approach does not always produce the desired results.Alcohol, ego soothing and confidence boosting agent that it is, has contributed to any number of miraculous claims made by blokes in pubs. Some of my personal favourites include sleep deprivation not being a condition that can cause death, bullets being unable to kill people (individual expectation and blood loss kills people, I know, don’t look at me) and Jesus was blonde with blue eyes, there are pictures to prove it.The twin risk factor with alcohol is the lack of reliance on memory, both in the teller of the tale and the receiver of the information.When a piss poor crook becomes Billy The KidGhostly legends stalk the pool rooms and bar stools of pubs across the world. It’s the natural order, which is why the old time bars used to include buckets of sand or salt, to take with the tall tales and outlandish claims.Almost every semi-regular bar dweller has heard the one about the dead cert international footballer who blew a knee out, or the champion jockey who grew too much. We like the implied suggestion of success and of near misses that make us feel more human.We love the outlaws, renegades, underdogs and dirty dogs of misdeed, myth and lore. We love pulling for the nearly men and women above the clearly men and women. Who needs the super talent, made big, lived forever stories? That’s why we like our heroes flawed; our rock stars dead and our sportsmen blitzed on booze.Every walk of life has its collection of dead rock stars. Villainy and bank robbery are no exception. By the time I’ve sunk a gallon, I’m well on the way to Wild West notoriety in my head. I’m Cole Younger, shit, I’m all of the Dalton’s and the Sundance Kid and you’d better get the fuck away from my shadow, man.Just saying…The Sundance Kid wasn’t known as such for dancing in sunshine.Back to the Bucket List and your mother wouldn’t like itIt’s all well and good to hatch out some list of quasi achievements that you would like to append to your obituary but the trouble is; posthumous drama can hurt you whilst you’re still alive.Show me some hot headed rascal chasing around with a vendetta agenda and I can probably lead you to a surprise eyed mother, wondering what she did wrong. Mothers do that, they blame themselves. Fathers, well, they’re a little complicated on that front.They blame everyone else.So if you’re planning to hold up a train or something, it might be as well if the old girl knows nothing about it. Dementia can be handy here, or geographical distance.Immigration ain’t what it used to beUnfortunately, even with the world’s borders remaining more or less where they were left for the last few hundred years, a few name changes and planning permission to knock walls down not withstanding; leaving your birth country no longer insulates against the effects of infamy.Even mothers of advancing years now often feel compelled to check the news online. I am pretty sure that a mug shot of a son carries even greater risk of alarm when beamed across the ether onto your laptop than it does, say, on the front page of the Dumbarton Advertiser. I don’t much care where my mother is. She left my life with a man called Colin when I was fourteen.And so…I’ve never met anyone called Colin that I have liked or trusted.But…That doesn’t make my mother (or Colin) responsible for my decision making or the consequences of it. So just in case anyone is hankering after twitching behind that particular curtain, don’t bother. I won’t be telling. Mothers are a complicated proposition, no doubt, but so to, I would venture, are sons.Back to the pubLucy thinks the whole idea is a romantic one, not in the Mills and Boon sense but in the legends and folklore sense previously touched upon. She is intrigued by the contradiction of Dan and I being bone idle bastards and having enough about us to go forth and dent the economy.The last I can remember of the conversation was Dan’s voice fading into the distance, as I struggled to maintain upright wakefulness.Cameras all the timeStreet level, eye level, eye in the sky, news on the fly, cameras in phones, surveillance in homes. If you can do it, someone will film it. It’s the information age, all access, no boundary reality and no-one is exempt.In a practical sense, cameras don’t facilitate a cover-up. It is difficult to hide from the eyes in the sky if you have a master plan that involves ripping off a few financial institutions, knocking over some post offices or sorting a burglar with a baseball bat.An extra layer of planning would be needed to bypass this nosey institutionalised version of the motherland. Dan reckons we’re the most watched nation per head of the population within the joke that is the European Union.I have my reservations regarding those of the political persuasion and the invasion of closed circuit television. It all seems like a lot of digging around in other people’s business to me. Such activity rarely leads to anything interesting and often leaves the chap with the shovel wishing they had not bothered in the first place.Another considerationDespite the lack of a fighting chance to beat this disease that is growing inside me, I still have to go through the charade of ‘treatment.’ I’m an outpatient at one of Liverpool’s under-funded and badly resourced hospitals. I struggle to see how I don’t fit into the ‘waste of money’ category.Whilst I’m pretending that I’m not just hurtling head long to the box and the soil or the flame, I have to fill in countless forms, conform to queuing systems that eat up more of my minutes and pretend to ‘bravely’ fight the condition.Ahead of the pine box, I have had to tick the marital status box, the religious beliefs box, the ethnic origin box and the sexual orientation box.I’ll come back to the little squares later.Treatment will be another issue.Dan and I have to co-ordinate appointments, check-up’s, treatments and chemist runs with the glorious swag blag that is beginning to look more appealing the more bitter I become about the predicament of an expiry date.There’s no hiding from it. We can’t procrastinate and prevaricate forever, at some point we are going to have to get to grips with the job in hand if we are to have any comfort in those last days.If it sounds like I’m being a little blasé that’s probably because I am. You don’t get a diagnosis of this magnitude and immediately deal with it. I’m told there are a lot of stages to it and I can look forward to that process complicating matters further too. It would be helpful if Dan and I could co-ordinate our stages of terminal acceptance but life and I suppose death doesn’t really work like that, does it?Be open and transparentI was with my doctor this morning. His name is Dr Oxley and I’m sure he is a very clever man.He asked me how I was ‘doing?’“I’m dying.”“I suppose so, yes.”“It’s okay though, I have a plan.”“You do?”“Yes. I’m going to rob some banks and then go abroad somewhere nice.”“It’s good that you still have your sense of humour.”I find generally that being honest with people tends to catch them off guard. I’ve told a few people now that I intend to engage in wholesale currency removal and none of them seem particularly impressed or bothered by it at all.I haven’t told Dan because that would be pointless and I haven’t told X because she would laugh at me and then try to tap me up for the imaginary money that she will be sure I am joking about.I haven’t made a will.Talking of wills…Motorcycles. No getting away from it; they are dangerous. They are also exciting and at times a little frightening and if we are to pull this off, then I am going to have to ride better than ever before and with the extra weight both in terms of physical weight and responsibility of having Dan perched on the back of the thing.I have three and I’m leaning toward the idea of rotating them to keep things as complicated as possible from an identification and detection stand point.Now I’m no flat track burner or TT racer but I can shift when I need to. I haven’t got a lot of time to teach Dan the finer points of pillion riding, I’ve told him to lean when I do and to lean the same way I do. Beyond that, he’s going to have to hold on to me like I was some woman he spent his life savings on.I’m not going into detail about the bikes yet. That can wait. Besides, I get a bit boring when I rattle on about the things. The problem with using all three bikes is that two of them are registered in my name. The third is registered in the name Saddar Mohammad Khalil, not of this parish. I don’t know who he is, I didn’t buy the bike from him and I have never met him. He may have been a previous occupant of my address, as the DVLC appeared to feel that his name was the most deserving, if we were going to apportion custody of a Kawasaki and appoint a legal guardian. I’ve never bothered to do anything about this, as the Kawasaki is the most nimble of my bikes and therefore the one that tends to excite the speed cameras.The last word, until the next last word…Shouldn’t death be some grand, sweeping gesture, a finale to rival anything we did whilst living, or am I to mind my own business and simply close my eyes like some submissive virgin in a shady, seed infested stage play or one of those old VHS tapes were all the tracking is knackered because of an horrendous over use of the pause button by some short sighted pervert.My most recent near death experienceMy friend and former work colleague Josh Pike died one Wednesday morning in his cube adjacent to mine and with his headset still in place.It wasn’t my fault.I know it wasn’t my fault because people kept telling me. They said things like ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself.” or “there was nothing you could have done.”I still don’t know what did for Josh but that hardly stopped people from making shit up. I’ve heard about aneurisms and cerebral haemorrhages, blood pressure, this cortex and that lobe.Josh was fat.Some people think he died because he was fat. Like Elvis.Josh used to tell me that my enthusiasm was a very positive thing and that more people should be like me. I never really knew what to say when he said things like that. Josh could be very direct for a fat man.Education, education, educationMy education faded to nothing just after my ‘A’ levels. I needed to support myself and I couldn’t do that sitting in cafeterias smoking joints and talking about Nitschke or any other dead Russians. My qualifications are call centre qualifications. I tick the boxes for customer service requirements. I stay calm when shouted at and most of the time, I try to help.I just sat there when they took Josh Pike away. I sat to one side in my chair with wheels on, sort of crumpled and worried in a non-specific way. It made me more important for a day or so but people changed the subject after that.When I got home that night, I was faced with the man across the landing going on about Bosnia and how it had ruined his life. He divulged this information once every couple of weeks. I never knew his name. I think there is every chance that he may have forgotten it.Going through life with hardly anyone to know, remember or care what your name is seems a bit bloody much to me.Make your mark, son. Make them know who you are. You see, none of us wants to expire anonymously, not really. Loose endsI called my brother, ostensibly, to inform him of my doom, my expiry, my reduction to dust, shit or bust, time out, time stops, no more batteries in little clocks.I’ve made this call before of course and never got around to telling him the truth. Or is that The Truth, the inescapable and more than probable fact that awaits us all. It’s a cast iron certainty; a before its time travesty and a thing too bleak to contemplate in an unaltered mind state, at any rate.My brother is a driving instructor. He also suffers from road rage. I’m unsure and he is unclear of which discipline he became proficient in first. He has regaled me, on the phone and across unvarnished pub saloon tables with tales of shouting out of windows, reaching across students to gesticulate and reducing more than one fragile learner to tears. His rage is not saved exclusively for third parties, students get it too. Simmering and seething; uncontained and furious in its proportions. He’s always had a temper, my brother.As a child he fought, argued, kicked, bit, punched… the currency of school yard vengeance. He was thrown out of secondary learning with a harmless looking letter sent to our parents informing them of his dangerous nature, as though they had not witnessed these tidal like regular eruptions for themselves.“The thing is,” I tell him.“The doctor said,” I say.“The prognosis,” I add.Still, I never get around to the point, perhaps mindful that he may fly into a burst of insults and bile at not having been consulted on the matter beforehand, having not given approval for my removal.Funny fish are people, or so the thought process goes and my brother is a pike. Brooding and full of razor wire teeth. Family attachments are layered. He talks more to our mother than I do and occasionally provides me with updates or bulletins on her progress, or that of her and Colin. Or, ‘The man that made my mother run away.’ I have no interest in Colin and he tells me that it’s all ancient history. He’s right of course but I teeter around somewhere between despising and surprising in my reactions to the situation. Like a child still, wanting to hold everything in place. Pathetic, I know but it isn’t helped by the fact that Colin is a bit of a twat.So we end the conversation with my brother informing me of some married woman fling he has got himself wrapped up in and I am left to wonder if infidelity runs in the family or actually in humanity. Is it an inescapable fact of life or just something that happens? Who am I to judge anyway?I try to let my sister in on the situation but she is more guarded than my brother and more apt at spontaneous shows of fake emotion. Since I have little patience or appetite for her tears or wailing, we talk about holidays and car finance, about her son, Austin, who is excelling at under achievement, she asks me what I think she should do about him. I know him less than she does and she hardly appears to know him at all. So Austin and my numbered days are both off the table, so far as conversational distractions go.I suppose it will all eventually come out in the bish bash bosh.My father’s son and chips off the old blockMy dad is a decent enough sort of a bloke. After mum pissed off with Colin, my dad just got pissed. He punched Colin too, twice. Once that had been achieved, he settled for more getting pissed and got pretty good at it. It was a simple and predictable cycle; get pissed, get pissed off, get pissed again. Conversely, he sometimes mixed that up with get pissed off, get pissed and get pissed off again.He did this successfully for about three years and then met a woman. Now they piss each other off and get pissed together.It’s a pattern of behaviour, parentally patented and then perpetuated within the framework of my own relationships. X and I had a great talent for pissing each other off and then forgetting what it was all about due to being pissed. Now, if this behaviour is hard wired into my DNA – a design feature of my motherboard, then I can hardly be blamed. Unfortunately, I have awareness of this particular flaw and with awareness comes a responsibility. Decisions follow, accept the flaw and do nothing, or accept responsibility for the flaw and try to change it? What’s it going to be, lad? There’s no right or wrong, or good and bad, no ultimate answers to the puzzles had. I personally believe that each of us is our own pilot. I’m not sure what it means but I say it a lot when I’m too drunk to think and sometimes it gets a favourable response.I must get around to checking in on my dad. He still lives in Liverpool, so it should be straight forward enough.Campaign BreakfastDan meets me for a few eggs and bits of pig and Lucy tags along full of news about her friend who works in a CCTV control centre. It might be the breakthrough we need.“She says most of the cameras are never on because the city can’t afford to run them all the time. So if, for example, you were robbing a post office on County Road, chances are, you wouldn’t be seen by cameras.”“How is she so sure about this?” I say, imagining speeding down County Road on my Honda with Dan hanging on to me and the loot at the same time.“Like I said, she works there.”“Why would she tell you this?” says Dan. Finger on the paranoid pulse.“We’ve been mates for years. She tells me all sorts.”“I’ve been thinking explosives on cash machines could be better,” says Dan. “Three in the morning… blam! There you go and no-one will know.”“Do you know how to do that?” I ask.“I used to be in the army. It’s simple.”You see, people and their past lives. I didn’t know Dan had been in the army. I’ve known him for a while now and he had never mentioned it. The army is possible, it’s also possible that Dan is just trying to impress Lucy and hadn’t been in the army at all.“So you can use guns, too?”“’Course I can use fuckin’ guns.”“That might have been helpful to know in the initial planning stages.”“Aren’t we still in the initial planning stages?”“Not if you know how to use guns and you know how to blow stuff up. No, I would suggest that we have moved into the final planning stages.”“That’s exciting,” says Lucy and pokes half a sausage into her fried egg.“I don’t want this to just be talk,” says Dan. “We’ve come this far, if you’re not up for it, I’ll do it on my own.”I look at Lucy for a bit until I realise he is talking to me. “Why wouldn’t I be up for it?”“Just saying.”“Well don’t, I’m up for it.”“Right, I’ve got gear for explosives and you can come with me to buy the guns.”“When’s that happening?”“Tonight.”He pushes a piece of paper toward me, slightly grease soiled in one corner and torn from a faintly blue ruled pad. Scribbled on the paper is a meeting spot and a time. I divulge it and then for effect, I screw it up and eat it.“What you do that for?” says Lucy.“Destroying the evidence. We’re not here to fuck about.”We toast each other with strong mugs of tea and I wonder what Lucy would look like smeared with blueberry jam and lettuce.